The Slavery of Death: Part 21, Insurrection

In the early posts in this series we spent a lot of time focusing on Christus Victor theology and how it focuses salvation upon rescuing us from death and a life enslaved to the fear of death.

In more recent posts we began to unpack all this from a psychological perspective, mainly drawing on the work of Ernest Becker, but with significant help from the work of theologians such as William Stringfellow, James Alison, and Arthur McGill.

The climax of the psychological analysis was this. Our slavery to the fear of death causes us to seek self-esteem through cultural hero systems. However, given that these hero systems are largely created to repress and channel our existential fears, we find our self-esteem projects to be shallow, hollow and fragile. To use James Alison's turn of phrase, we get self-esteem by pursuing ersatz meaning. Another way of saying this is that self-esteem is largely a neurotic enterprise.

But there is more here than merely noting the neurotic nature of self-esteem. The fact that humans are neurotic might be sad and pathetic but not particularly devilish or demonic. But the satanic outworking is observed when we note that the hero systems that give life meaning and security have to be believed in absolutely and protected from the threat of ideological outsiders. Thus the dark outcome: To preserve my self-esteem and life significance (often encoded in "our way of life") I have to demonize, in large ways or small, outgroup members.

This is why people kill for their gods and way of life. That which provides the foundation of our identities--our values, nation, worldview, religion and traditions--must be protected. Why? Because the alternative, to live naked and defenseless before death, is too heavy a psychological burden.

In all this we see a psychological understanding of what it might mean to be "held in slavery all our lives to the fear of death" and why such an enslavement leads to "the devil's works."

With all this in place, it's now time to devote some posts to what we should do about this situation. In light of Christus Victor theology how are we to be "set free" from the slavery to the fear of death and the violence it produces?

We've already gotten some hints about what this might look like. We've discussed McGill's idea of moving from identity-as-possession to identity-as-gift, an "eccentric identity" in the words of David Kelsey. We've also considered James Alison's discussion of "living as if death were not."

Those are important ideas that we'll be building on. But our review of Ernest Becker's work forces us to go a bit deeper.

Specifically, if my cultural worldview is, at root, a form of death repression, then what does it mean for me to "die" to this existence? It means leaving behind everything that, prior to my baptism, gave me worth, meaning, and significance. It means being "dead" to those things from which I constructed my identity. This is what Paul is describing in Romans 6:

Romans 6.2-9
We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him.

Death has no mastery over Jesus. And those who die with Jesus in baptism share in this liberation, the mark of which is being set free from sin to live a new life according to the Spirit.

But such a dying to the old self, the self that was mastered by the fear of death, is a terrifying prospect. Who am I once the cultural props have been kicked away? How will I find self-esteem if I let go of all my blue ribbons? How will I carry on if I listen to the Teacher of Ecclesiastes who informs me that my life projects are, at root, "meaningless" and "vanity"?

In The Denial of Death Ernest Becker attempts to answer this question, though he admits that he is articulating something of an ideal that might be unreachable. He suggests that the best we can do is to learn to master our anxiety less neurotically and more directly. Only then can we take charge of our anxiety and not allow it to affect or damage others. I don't have to demonize or kill others because I fear death. I don't have to fall into the Devil's trap as described above. Still, this is hard work as Becker summarizes,

The most one can achieve is a certain relaxedness, an openness to experience that makes [a person] less of a driven burden on others.

William Stringfellow calls this relaxed, non-anxious existence "living humanely in the midst of the Fall." We live among Death's works but we are not pushed and pulled by the fear of death. As Paul describes Jesus in Romans 6, death has no mastery over us.

How might all this look, religiously speaking?

An interesting resource in this regard is the new book Insurrection by Peter Rollins.

Rollins's book follows a trajectory parallel to Becker's in The Denial of Death. I don't know if Rollins has read Becker, but he should as Becker has worked out, in much greater psychological detail, the picture Rollins sketches in Insurrection. (And I also think this series works out some theological foundations that can inform and deepen Rollins's work.)

At the start of Insurrection Rollins talks about, following Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a god who is a deus ex machina. This is a god who is artificially dropped into our world to solve our problems, justify our way of life, and provide some existential comfort. This is the god behind our hero system, the god that props up our self-esteem projects. Unfortunately, as Becker has shown us, this is also the god we kill for.

Rollins argues that the Christian notion of crucifixion involves the death of this god, the existential crutch that helps us cope with existence. Similar to Becker's analysis, Rollins suggests that this "death" involves a loss of everything that made life structured and meaningful:

To experience the Crucifixion is to lose all the supports that would protect us from a direct confrontation with the world and with ourselves. We are robbed of all the stories that we construct about God and our own nature. Stripped of the guarantees and fantasies that previously marked out existence, we come face-to-face with anxiety in its various manifestations (death, meaninglessness, guilt).

This is a radical notion. As we have discussed repeatedly in the comments in this series, "God" can have one of two meanings. We've mainly been discussing the "god" that sits behind the hero system, the religious idol that confers legitimacy to my worldview and my life. This god is, at root, a neurotic coping mechanism. Which is why we need to kill to "protect" it. Thus, crucifixion for Rollins involves the death of god. Crucifixion involves the death of religion as religion is simply one aspect of the cultural hero system holding us captive (neurotically speaking). "Christianity" in this understanding is simply one hero system among many other hero systems, one among many neurotic paths to achieve self-esteem that will, in the end, bring us into conflict with others. "Christianity" here is simply another manifestation of our "slavery to the fear of death," the deus ex machina we create to solve our death problem (e.g., a fix for anxiety, meaning, self-esteem). Rollins describing this:

To lose that which grounds us and provides us with meaning involves nothing less than losing the God of religion in whatever form it manifests itself in our life. This does not require ceasing to believe intellectually in some overarching principle that guides us, but rather it means losing the psychological power that such a principle possesses of us. Like Jesus, we too must make the journey from Gethsemane to Golgotha, a journey in which we pass from the sacrifice of religion (where we give up everything for God) to the sacrifice of religion itself (where we give up everything including God).

In the sacrifice of religion, we lose all the security that any deus ex machina might provide for us. In this dark hour, when the very earth beneath us gives way, we experience utter desolation.

According to Rollins this is how we are united in Christ's death. We cry out with Jesus as we experience the death of god in our lives: "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me!"

We undergo this death because the god of the cultural hero system is an idol, an existential death fetish, an illusion we use to keep death repressed and out of awareness. More, this god was the devil's work in our lives, the motive behind why we protected our ingroup and demonized the outgroups. So this god has to die for us to be able to love others fully. But again, the existential burden here is enormous:

We must give [Jesus's] cry its full theologically and existential weight. We must read it with all its horror and potency. It is a cry that comes from one cut off from all grounding in a deeper reality, one who has lost all sense of meaning, all mythological frames. It is a cry that exposes us to a man utterly destitute.

To die with Christ, therefore, we have to move through this experience, intentionally and repeatedly. If we are to truly love others we have to let go of the cultural hero system, which includes god and religion, and undergo a "dark night of the soul" where we are left with nothing to ground our identity. But on the other side of this experience is a life freed to live for others. As Rollins describes it:

In this very act of forsaking the religious God, along with all the psychological comfort that comes with it, we can find a way of fully affirming God--not in some belief we affirm but in the material practice of love. So then, as we turn away from the obsessive desire to find fulfillment, meaning, and acceptance, we come into direct contact with them. This is life before death; this is life in all its fullness.

In this view, god is no longer a idol that props up my self-esteem or our "way of life." Rather, God is the act of love itself, an act that is only truly possible when the death of god has taken place. For us to truly find God and love others we have to let the religious idol die. Because if the idol remains it becomes the source of outgroup demonization and violence. We'll let Rollins take us home:

Resurrection faith is then manifested in a freedom and liberation in which we are able to courageously and fully embrace this world without repression, resentment, and fear. It is a way of living in love, a love that embraces existence, not because it is perfect, but because it is beautiful in the midst of its very imperfection.

This does not mean that we stop experiencing anxiety and sadness--not at all--but that in the very midst of these we still find life worth living. We no longer need to hide from our sadness and repress it. Rather, we can confront it and work through it. Indeed, it is the very acceptance of our sadness that can lead to its dissipation. Just as grace (the experience of accepting that we are accepted as we are) enables us to change, so too, by accepting that we must mourn (rather than run from it) we can ourselves move through our pain (rather than having it return again and again in various masked forms).

Here, death is robbed of its sting (1 Corinthians 15.55) and despair is overcome...

All this means that the event of Resurrection opens up a type of religionless faith in which we are able to embrace the world and ourselves without some security blanket. It is here, amidst the ashes of the death of the deus ex machina, that a different understanding of God becomes visible. This God is affirmed where people are gathered together in love and is testified to where the sick are healed, the starving fed, and where those who dwell in death are raised into life. "Where two or three come together in my name," we read in the Gospel according to Matthew, "there am I with them." In other words, where people are gathered together in love, God is present.